Appendix 2 - Age and sex

Summary

Correcting for age and sex to produce a uniform measure of the composition of the labour force is possible, but requires so many assumptions about the samples that would be subjected to these corrections that it was decided to present the uncorrected totals.

The standard method involves, first, constructing a series of deflators to convert women's labour, children's labour, etc., into men's labour. Cho and Gill have done this in their studies of South Korea and India, using the wages of women and children relative to those of men as the deflators. But early modern wage data are scarce, and usually intractable. Wages actually paid to individuals can be gathered from a few account books, from presentments at Quarter Sessions, and from settlement examinations, but unless we know the age of the servant or labourer receiving these wages, we cannot know which were the wages of adults and which were those of children, and we are back where we started. Wage assessments made at Quarter Sessions are no guide.

They are highly formalized, never more so than in the wages assigned to men and women. In none of the assessments examined were the wages of the meanest man servant lower than those of the most important woman servant. Men and women were assigned tasks according to their sex, and wages were thus paid on the basis of sex.